ECMAScript 6 brings powerful new capabilities and some tasty syntactical sugar to the ubiquitous Javascript language, as it continues to grab an ever increasing slice of developer mindshare.

Now that the ES6 feature set is frozen and just minor refinements will be made over the coming months, much of this new functionality has already landed in modern browsers, and will continue to roll out with each new browser update.

For the impatient, there are also now several excellent precompile / polyfill / shim tools available, so you can start using these new features immediately; safely knowing that your code will run ‘natively' on every Javascript platform.

Javascript has become far more successful and ubiquitous than Brendan Eich or Netscape ever imagined, and several of the significant changes in the new spec, are designed with server side scripting platforms in mind (eg Node.js, and various scriptable database engines...).

This is an overview of some of the key changes in ES6

Block Bindings

A new let keyword declares a variable (like var) but restricts its scope to the current code block (unlike var which is only scoped to function block); let also does not sharevar hoisting characteristics, so a let variable cannot be used until after its declaration (or it will throw an error).

You can now assign default values to function parameters, which will be used if the parameter is not formally passed.

function myFunc( url, timeout=3000, callback=function(){} )

Rest Parameters

Designed to replace use of arguments when working with variable numbers of parameters, and indicated by three dots ... preceding a named parameter. The named parameter then becomes an array containing the rest of the parameters (passed but not specified).

function sum(first, second, ...others){
console.log(others.length);
}

Spread Operator

Spread is the opposite of Rest parameters and splits an array into individual parameters.

Iterators are objects that have a next() method which returns a results object with two properties, value and done. Iterators offer a collection of values one at a time through successive calls to next() returning the appropriate value or result with done==true if no more values to read.

ES6 collection objects (like arrays, maps and sets) all have three default iterators. These are entries(), values() and keys() and cover most common iteration needs.

ES6 also introduces a new syntax for dealing with iterators. The for-of loop which is used for looping over iterable objects.

for(let i of ['one','two','three') console.log(i)

NOTE: for..of and for..in loops look similar, but are fundamentally different.for..in is for inspecting object properties and looping over the object's enumerable properties, whereas for..of is for looping over iterators.

for..of is also available in array comprehensions.

[ x for (x of a) if (x>5) ]

Generators

A generator is a special kind of function that returns an iterator by inserting a * after thefunction keyword. A new yield keyword is used inside of generators to specify values that iterator should return when next() is called.

Generators stop execution after each yield until next() is called again, which is a powerful new paradigm (eg for managing asynchronous processes).

var longString = `here we have
a multiline string
using backtick quotes`;

Promises

Promises are a mechanism for handling results (and errors) from asynchronous operations. You can achieve the same thing with callbacks, but promises provide improved readability via method chaining and simple error handling. Promises are already used in many JavaScript libraries.

About Trevor ParsonsTrevor Parsons is Chief Scientist and Co-founder of Logentries. Trevor has over 10 years experience in enterprise software and, in particular, has specialized in developing enterprise monitoring and performance tools for distributed systems. He is also a research fellow at the Performance Engineering Lab Research Group and was formerly a Scientist at the IBM Center for Advanced Studies. Trevor holds a PhD from University College Dublin, Ireland.

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